While you were busy watching football, eating dry turkey, and flashing tense, frozen smiles at your annoying relatives, Tiger Woods was getting beaten senseless by his wife. Here's a round-up of what we know in case you were otherwise engaged.
So much golf racism, these days! Who would ever even think to use the ancient, traditional sport of monied old white dudes for such terrible purposes? First, there was the incredibly confusing golf course swastika.
Big news for golf aficionados who also happen to be closely following the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. As Reuters reported last week, ex-Lehman CEO Dick Fuld gave up his membership at the Blind Brook Country Club in Purchase following his fall from grace last year. Our trusted source for all mogul-related golf news now tells us that Blind Brook isn't the only club that no longer has the pleasure of Fuld's company. He's also abandoned his membership at the Quaker Ridge Golf Club in Scarsdale. Clearly, the situation has gone from bad to much, much worse.
Andrés Piedrahita may have canceled his summer cruise down the Dalmatian coast aboard his $22 million yacht, but other members of the family are still getting outside for some fun in the sun. A source tells us—and we've since confirmed—that Walter Noel, the founder of the Fairfield Greenwich Group, Piedrahita's father-in-law, and the man who "lost" $7 billion of his investors' money to Bernie Madoff's epic scam, is golfing once again. After taking a year-long hiatus, Noel returned to the Sebonack Golf Club in Southampton last week for the first time since August 2008. And he's been back two times since then. It's hard to blame him. Once he's indicted this fall, he probably won't have much time to practice his swing, now will he? You'll find Noel's score history—which indicates his golf game hasn't suffered much since he hit the links last summer—below.
It may seem as if Michael Bloomberg has it all. But money doesn't buy you everything, you know. All the riches in the world can't turn a nebbishy guy from Medford, Massachusetts into Tiger Woods, and so despite all the effort the mayor has put into improving his golf game since taking up the sport in 2000, he hasn't been able to improve all that much. But it's not like he doesn't want to. He's "obsessed" with the game, according to Christine Quinn. And it's not as if he isn't trying. He is. He really is.
Last year, Rudy Giuliani's son Andrew filed a lawsuit against Duke University after the school kicked him off the golf team. Andrew claimed that Duke's golf coach had made up a series of allegations in order to force him off the team and had turned his classmates against him. The school (and the coach) countered by saying Giuliani had been dumped for "a variety of boorish acts, including assaulting a teammate, defying coaches, and violating 'both the rules and the spirit of the game of golf.'" (In other words, he behaved much the same way you'd expect given his equally boorish dad.) A judge finally weighed in yesterday and dismissed the lawsuit—but not before slipping in a series of references to Caddyshack in the process. Andrew shouldn't have any trouble putting this legal defeat behind him. As the Smoking Gun points out, "Giuliani graduated this month from Duke, so he's got that going for him."
Bernie Madoff didn't just screw over the members of the Palm Beach Country Club. He also managed to ruin more than a few families who belong to the North Shore Country Club on Long Island. A third of its members have had to cancel their $16,000-a-year memberships, the club is now laying off staff, and it may be forced to shut down entirely if it doesn't find an investor. [NYP]
In your meaty Tuesday media column: rumors of coming layoffs (and a die-off?) at OK! magazine, a golf magazine is killed, advertising plummets, media companies may default, and Americans don't know a damn thing:
Citigroup is on the brink of disaster and may have to turn over as much as 40 percent of the bank to the government in an effort to stay solvent. So what's Chuck Prince, who served as Citi's chairman and CEO until late 2007, been up to recently? Not so much. Chuck has been spending most of his time in recent months on the golf course. Unfortunately, this has required him to make the commute from Manhattan—he sold his Connecticut mansion last fall for $5.2 million. Fortunately, his generous exit package from Citi includes an office, assistant, and full-time car and driver, so he can still recline in the backseat and read all about Citi's implosion in the Journal as he heads out to the club. All that time golfing has yet to do much for his handicap, however. But since he's relatively young and it's unlikely he'll ever land another job on Wall Street, he should have plenty of time to practice. Prince's score history is after the jump.
Man, Obama is the best. Did you know we just won the war in Iraq? It's true! The proof? The US is apparently installing a driving range in the Green Zone.
Oh, hey, look, it's Barack Obama, being elitist and hating America, during a depression. Prepare to see this photo of the president-elect playing golf throughout the right-wing media, and probably everywhere.
As if it wasn't bad enough that Bernie Madoff is accused of carrying out the biggest financial fraud in the history of the world, there's evidence that he may have cheated at golf, too. "They say you can tell a lot about a businessman from his golf game," explains Catherine Rampell on the Times' Economix blog. "Perhaps golf partners should have paid more attention to Bernard Madoff's handicap." What does Madoff's handicap tell us? Well, it seems his scores were "eerily consistent," even after he took a year off in between games. But there's more to chew on, conspiracy theorists: His handicap was a 12, which correlates to the 12 percent annual return that he promised many of his investors. On a related note, we've been informed he had precisely 12 candles on his birthday cake the year following his 11th birthday. Just so you know.
Click to viewBoomp3.com The creative and sales departments of popular fictitious advertising agency Sterling Cooper hit the back 9 for a lil’ company retreat on Monday afternoon. The typically Mad Men became a group of Mellow Men despite going over—very over—par on their outing. The usually dapper Don Draper enjoyed a relaxed look. Draper said, “No one bothered us. No one asked me for advice or to come home with them. It was refreshing.” [Photo Credit: Getty Images] *A Call To The Bullpen is a work of fiction. Although the pictures we use are most certainly real, Defamer does not purport that any of the incidents or quotations you see in this piece actually happened. Lighten up, people ... it's a joke.
Judi Giuliani looked pretty foolish last Friday after the Times reported on the allegations made by Russell Harding, the former administration official who launched a blog last month containing all sorts of embarrassing tidbits about the ex-mayor's third wife. (Among other things, Harding described how Judi wrangled a low-income apartment using Rudy's ties to the real estate industry, and described how she routinely abused the NYPD officers assigned to protect her.) The Giulianis refused to answer questions on the record, but clearly the salacious revelations hurt. This past weekend, Rudy and Judi did what they generally do on the weekends: they hit the golf course. And poor Judi had her worst outing in a year and a half. The ups and downs of Judi golf game after the jump.
Rudy Giuliani would like you to know he's really, really busy. So busy, in fact, that he hasn't had a single second to reflect on why his candicacy for president imploded. "I have three, four, five things all going on at once," he told the Times over the weekend, mentioning trips to London, Ukraine, Switzerland, Japan and Kazakhstan, his busy schedule campaigning for John McCain, and his efforts to bolster his consulting/security business Giuliani Partners and the law firm where he serves as a partner, Bracewell & Giuliani. But is Rudy really that busy? What happened to all the golf he was playing?
